Um é de Bob Woodward, outro de Jonathan Alter e haverá ainda um terceiro de Ryan Lizza.
Um artigo de Michael Calderone, no POLITICO.COM:
«“Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin has touched off a debate about anonymous sourcing and the accuracy of narrative-driven political books. But the debate isn’t likely to end soon because Bob Woodward and at least two other prominent political journalists, Jonathan Alter and Ryan Lizza, have similar books about the Obama administration coming out this year.
Woodward, the capital’s foremost fly-on-the-wall chronicler of political power, is unapologetic about using anonymous sourcing to enable high-level participants to give accounts of contemporary events. “It’s the only method if you’re going to get an unlaundered version of what occurred,” he said.
But Woodward balks at the idea that he was simply “recreating” scenes in his books. “It’s reported,” he said. “So-and-so was there and they said this. There are meeting notes and so forth.”
His new book, which he said is “going very well,” will use the same methods, and a White House official confirmed that Woodward is getting access to senior officials and will likely sit down with the president.
Alter, a Newsweek senior editor who will be first out of the gate with his Obama White House book in May - “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” - said “the idea that you can write one of these books without using anonymous sources is erroneous.”
“Long-form journalism or works of history benefit from narrative drive,” Alter said. “Most of my scenes are quite short, but it is necessary to include some dialogue in order to take the reader as close as possible to what happened. In my reporting experience, people tend to remember quite well what the president said. I often rely on their memories if the quotations are short.”
Background sourcing can be essential, Alter said, because “you don’t want the source to be parsing every word. You want them to tell you what happened.”
Granting sources anonymity is a bargain made daily in Washington journalism, with the upside being proximity to the unvarnished truth. The downside: getting spun by sources for their own purpose while under the cloak of anonymity.
“Game Change,” which has already been optioned by HBO, has a cinematic feel, complete with such controversy-courting details as a phone conversation between Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy in which Kennedy later “fumed that Clinton had said, A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”
What Clinton allegedly said isn’t in quotation marks—a practice that, according to the author’s note, “reflect[s] only a lack of certainty on the part of our sources about precise wording, not about the nature of the statements.” Although it may not be precise wording, several news organizations have run it as a verbatim quote from the 42nd president to the late lion of the Senate.
Plum Line blogger Greg Sargent questioned the methodology, writing that “in cases like these, when people are hinting at racism, the precise wording is everything. And in this case, the whole claim is based on an anonymous source’s recollection that someone who has now passed away told him or her that Clinton said something like this.”
For Sargent, “this really illustrates the perils of this approach to sourcing, particularly in the current media environment.”
That kind of sourcing can make it hard to evaluate the book’s content. Although Sen. Harry Reid readily acknowledged his by now-notorious remarks about Barack Obama’s skin color, it’s still not clear what the circumstances were when he made the remark. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spent a couple minutes on the air Tuesday asking (and asking and asking) both Halperin and Heilemann if he was talking in an interview with them. "We're not talking about who we interviewed for the book,” Halperin responded.
Still, other journalists agree with Woodward and Alter that in order to write a compelling narrative that takes the reader behind-the-scenes—often as events are still unfolding— there is often no alternative.
New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker, whose 2000 book “The Breach” used background sources to bring readers inside the Clinton impeachment and trial, said that as the author, you have “to decide is if you can write a more honest book if you give sources that sort of protection”
“In hindsight, I wish I had been able to do that book with footnotes and more transparent attribution,” Baker said, adding that it can be a “greater work of history” that way.
But when covering real-time events with subjects still in office, as Baker did in “The Breach,” it would have been far more difficult—if not impossible—to tell the story through on-the-record interviews only.
Baker said that he may try and conduct more on-the-record interviews and include footnoting for a book he’s planning to write for Doubleday on the Bush administration, given that the participants are no longer in office. But that will depend on what he gets from sources.
“If that’s not producing the kind of material that’s generally interesting or revelatory, or not catching the back-story, I’d rethink it,” Baker said.
“The unavoidable reality is that people who are uniquely qualified to reveal near-real-time events—particularly for a book that's published close to when the events occurred—aren’t likely to do so unless their identities are concealed,” said Robert Draper, who interviewed Bush and top staffers for his book “Dead Certain.”
“Like hollering at the rain, nothing's going to change that elemental truth in this town,” Draper continued. “That said, reconstructing a hitherto-secret narrative by means of anonymous sourcing is asking a lot of readers.”
Draper added that the “more insidious threat to journalistic credibility isn't anonymous sourcing but rather the tendency, on the part of some authors and reporters, to reward access with hagiography.”
Insiders typically read the narrative genre of political books on another level, parsing blind quotes for evidence of who blabbed and who didn’t. “It’s kind of a famous pastime,” said Dan Bartlett, who served as a high-level White House aide to former President George W. Bush. “People leave interesting tracks.”
Bartlett also has the unique perspective of someone who tried to manage a Woodward book. For “Bush at War”—the first of four books Woodward wrote on the administration— Bartlett said that Woodward was given “reams of material” and granted “countless” interviews with senior-level staffers and Bush. For his third Bush book, “State of Denial,” the White House decided not to give Woodward as much access or an interview with the president.
In Bartlett’s view, the tone and tenor of that book were more negative, reflecting the fact that often by providing key officials “you can undermine a potentially negative narrative.”
If narratives of contemporary events are influenced by who talks anonymously and who doesn’t, along with the level of access, will they play a significant role in the historical record?
Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who has written about Ronald Reagan as well as Andrew Jackson, said that “Game Change” or similarly-sourced books have “tended not to have an impact on historical assessment [but are] good for the moment.”
Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland” and a biography of Barry Goldwater, has a harsher view of the lack of transparency from Halperin and Heilemann. “Why should we grant them more cultural authority than we do the National Enquirer?” Perlstein said.
“These guys don’t care to defend themselves on the basic questions of verifiability,” Perlstein added. “If they’re comfortable with that, more power to them. We have to decide as readers and commentators whether we’re comfortable than that.”
But Halperin and Heilemann aren’t the first authors of such books to attract criticism over what can and cannot be verified. Whenever a Woodward book drops, someone involved always seems to question the accuracy of specific scenes. But often Woodward is vindicated.
After the publication of “Final Days,” Henry A. Kissinger said Woodward had gotten it wrong when he described him praying with Nixon the day before the president’s resignation. Years later, Kissinger wrote his own account of the prayer session.
And while some Clinton insiders blasted “The Agenda” in 1994, George Stephanopoulos, a White House aide when Woodward was writing his book described it in his memoir as “a comprehensive and basically accurate account.”
Political figures from Senator Charles Schumer to Sarah Palin have questioned the accuracy of “Game Change,” with the debate spilling out onto cable news. Even Woodward got into the act this week on MSNBC, raising questions about an anecdote early in the book in which the authors write that after watching Hillary Clinton’s reaction to losing the Iowa caucus, one of her “senior-most lieutenants thought for the first time, This woman shouldn’t be president.”
“The question is: who is it?” asked Woodward. And second, he continued, “does it reflect a fundamental attitude? Does this person really think this person shouldn't be president?"»